Gen Z Gets Its News From Friends, Not Anchors

Your front page no longer arrives folded on a doorstep or glowing from a cable chyron. It buzzes in your pocket: the group chat lighting up at midnight, your best friend posting a screenshot of a breaking story before any anchor finishes the intro. For Gen Z, the news from friends is not a side dish to the evening broadcast — it is the broadcast.

That sounds like a lifestyle quirk until you see the scale. According to the Reuters Institute, reported by TBS News, this year's Digital News Report found that 54% of respondents got news from social media or video platforms in the week before the survey — the first time those platforms beat TV at 52% and newspaper websites or apps at 51%. The findings rest on almost 100,000 online interviews across 48 countries, conducted early this year by pollsters YouGov.

Pew found the shift is sharpest among the young. In a late-2025 essay, Pew Research Center reported that 38% of U.S. adults under 30 regularly get news from social media news influencers — people with large followings who post about news and politics. Seven in ten young adults said they mostly get political news because they happen to come across it, not because they went looking. Only 15% of the under-30 crowd says it follows the news all or most of the time.

The mechanics favor the chat window. The Reuters survey found that on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, users were likelier to stumble across news while doing something else; only on X or YouTube did most people arrive specifically looking for it. Three in ten respondents named social or video platforms their main source of news — among 18- to 24-year-olds, that rose to half. In other words, the news from friends wins because it never asks you to show up. It shows up where you already are.

Trust now travels through people, not brands

The deeper story is trust. Half of Americans aged 18 to 29 say they have at least some trust in the information they get from social media sites — about as much as the 51% who say the same of national news organizations, per Pew. One 21-year-old man told Pew he trusts a familiar poster "more than some news site." The anchor's authority has been replaced by the friend's credibility: if someone in your circle vouches for a story, it clears the bar that a masthead no longer can.

Part of the appeal is emotional. A third of young adults say the news they get often makes them feel scared or confused, and "I try to avoid it for my sanity," one 24-year-old woman told Pew. A friend's message arrives with context, a joke, or a warning label — the opposite of the doom-scroll firehose. And the drift has been building for a decade: attention to news has been declining across all age groups since 2016, per Pew's tracking, until this June, when the Reuters survey marked the first global milestone of social and video platforms on top.

The counterpoint deserves airtime: your group chat is a terrible newsroom. Nobody in it is filing records requests or sitting through city council meetings — someone still has to do the original reporting your friend forwards. Overall trust in news sits at an all-time low, with just 37% of the Reuters survey's respondents saying they trust most news most of the time, and friend-forwarded feeds are fertile ground for rumors. As the report's lead author Jim Egan put it, the moment is "a drift rather than a shift" — gradual, but consequential.

What to do when the group chat is your newspaper

None of this means the habit is doomed — it means the literacy has to move with it. If news from friends is your front page, treat your circle like editors with standards: check a claim against one original source before forwarding it, follow at least a couple of reporters who do the unglamorous local work, and remember that the feed showing you a story is not the same as the story being true. We have written before about how rumors can outrun the actual evidence online — the group chat is exactly where that outrunning happens.

The industry, for its part, has two choices: keep lecturing young audiences for skipping the evening broadcast, or publish where the audience actually lives — short, sourced, shareable, and built for the chat window. The front page did not die. It just moved into your pocket, and it answers to a new editor: your friends. The news from friends keeps winning because it fits the way a generation already lives. For more takes on media and culture colliding, browse the Opinion section.